Christians believe that salvation and eternal life come through faith in Christ alone. Apart from Christ, no one can have a true, saving relationship with God. Apart from Christ, good works can do nothing to earn salvation or eternal life. Skeptics have raised a number of objections to this Christian understanding of salvation.
Exclusive and Intolerant
Objection #1: Aren’t all religions basically the same? It is exclusive, intolerant, and arrogant to claim that only the Christian religion is true while all others are false and that Christians are better than other people.
Response: It is simply not true that all religions are basically the same. Anyone acquainted with merely the basics about the major world religions can see that the religions of the world have major differences regarding fundamental questions about the nature of reality and the place of human beings within that reality. Pantheism, monotheism, and polytheism are very different understandings about the nature of reality. And even different monotheistic religions have very different understandings about who God is and how to properly relate to Him. Anyone who claims that all religions are basically the same is either deeply ignorant of the facts, or is deliberately distorting the facts in order to promote some social or political agenda.
These major differences in beliefs about metaphysical questions lead to major differences in beliefs about how human beings should live. For example, believing that one’s life is merely one small life in an endless series of reincarnations leads to a very different attitude towards life than believing that this life is all there is, or that everyone lives only one life, followed by God’s Final Judgment. So, it is simply not true that disagreements about metaphysical and theological questions are unimportant.
The Christian gospel is indeed an exclusive claim; it is a claim that God has acted to reconcile the world through Jesus Christ, and that this reconciliation takes place only through Jesus Christ. But every truth claim is an exclusive claim. If a belief is true, then every belief that contradicts it must be false. If the Christian gospel is true, then non-Christian religions must be false. This is not a matter of “arrogance,” but of simple, basic logic.
There is nothing inherently intolerant about making exclusive truth claims about religious questions. Christians are perfectly capable of believing that all non-Christian religions are false, while using only persuasion, rather than coercion, to convert non-Christians to Christianity. While there have been times when Christians have used coercion to force people into the visible Church, those have been unfortunate aberrations that obviously do not represent the true spirit of genuine, biblical Christianity.
Claiming that the Christian gospel is true is not a claim that Christians are better than non-Christians, or even that the Christian “religion” is better than non-Christian religions. Rather, it is a claim that Jesus truly is Lord of the whole world, and that He alone is the Way, the Truthy, and the Life, above all human ideologies, doctrines, and religions. Christians are merely those who know that this gospel is true and are trying (and often failing) to live their lives in light of it. Thus, there is nothing arrogant about proclaiming the Christian gospel and attempting to persuade others to accept this gospel as well.
Particular Rather than Universal
Objection #2: If God wants everyone to know Him and to be saved, why would He elect one small covenant people, Israel, and reveal Himself only to them? Instead, He should have created a universal religion, and revealed Himself to all people.
Response: God does indeed seek to reconcile the whole world to Himself. But His plan to do this is something that unfolds organically in the course of salvation history, rather than in an abstract manner. God does seek to reveal Himself to the whole world, but it is precisely through His covenant people that He does this.
The problem of sin, humanity’s separation from God, is not just that people are ignorant of God. The problem is that human beings are in rebellion against God and need to be radically transformed. This is why God just revealing Himself in the abstract to all people would not solve the problem of sin.
So instead, God’s plan was to elect a particular nation, form them into His holy covenant people, and then invite all people into a relationship with Him by joining this covenant people. Unfortunately, God’s covenant people themselves rebelled against God and became part of the problem. So, when the time was right, God Himself stepped in as Jesus to redeem His people from their sin. Now, through faith in Christ, anyone can become part of God’s holy covenant people and be reconciled to God. This is how God’s plan for the salvation of the world is unfolding, through the Church.
The Christian gospel is not a “religion.” It is the good news that God is reconciling all things to Himself through Jesus. This reconciliation takes place only through being radically transformed through union with Christ, which happens only by becoming part of the concrete reality of the Church, the body of Christ. This is why the suggestion that God should instead have saved people through an abstract, universal religion does not make sense.
Salvation Dependent on Belief
Objection #3: It does not make sense that salvation would be dependent on what we believe. First of all, what we believe is basically involuntary; if a person does not believe the gospel, then it must be because God has not given them enough evidence that it is true. Secondly, the very idea that God would save people based on whether they believe some strange theological formula about Jesus, rather than on how they live their lives, seems very arbitrary and bizarre.
Response: It is not true that what we believe is basically involuntary. There is a much more complex relationship between the intellect and the will than that. Our intellects are not detached, objective reasoning machines that absorb information unfiltered and then cause us to believe whatever logically follows from that information. Rather, the pursuit of genuine truth requires us to develop numerous intellectual virtues, such as open-mindedness, intellectual honesty, and intellectual humility. Without these intellectual virtues, we will often refuse to believe something we do not want to believe, even when the truth of it is staring us in the face. We have a moral responsibility to develop these virtues, and are morally blameworthy if we do not.
So, whether a person believes something or not is often determined, not by whether they are ignorant or not, but by whether they have an open mind and heart to accept the truth. Furthermore, ignorance of the truth is not always an excuse for not believing it, since we have a moral responsibility to seek the truth rather than remaining ignorant out of laziness or willful ignorance. Thus, it may be perfectly reasonable to blame someone for not believing the gospel.
Secondly, the idea that God saves people based just on whether they believe some strange theological formula about Jesus is a caricature of Christian soteriology. It is clear that when the New Testament speaks of “faith” in Christ, it is not talking about merely intellectually accepting that certain things about Jesus are true. Rather, it is talking about reorienting one’s entire life around the truth of the gospel, which requires repenting from sin and committing oneself to obedient service to the Lord Jesus as a member of the community of His disciples. Sin leads to eternal death, while righteousness and godliness, which truly come only through being united to Christ and transformed by Him, lead to eternal life. This is why it makes perfect sense for Christians to say that salvation is dependent on whether a person puts faith in Christ or not.